This is a unique opportunity for OpenSSO contributors, deployers and users to get together for a whole day of presentations and discussion in an 'unconference' format - the only fixed agenda item right now is to figure out the agenda. We're collecting ideas over the next few weeks at the OpenSSO wiki; if you're thinking of attending, do go there, take a look, and add any topics you want to speak on or hear about. Admission is free, with breakfast and lunch provided, and Daniel says he'll even bankroll the first round in the pub afterward .

So, if you're heading to New York City for CommunityOne, why not go early for a day (and possibly night!) of OpenSSO. If you're based in NYC, well, you have no excuse, go sign up, right now!

Tuesday Dec 16, 2008

Gartner recently released the Nov 2008 report on Web Access Management and Sun is now listed in the
leader's quadrant
(see image).
This is good news, both as a recognition of our efforts and also because some customers use the Magic Quadrant
to evaluate the viability of some vendors.

Sun's product in this space is
OpenSSO 8 Enterprise - the commercial distribution of
OpenSSO.
The product version runs on GFv2 but it can also be used on GFv3 prelude; just need this
small workaround :-)
Of course it will be fixed in the final v3.

For more adoption stories, check our
Informal Stories.
We are always looking for stories showcasing production use as these are critical to the growth of our community.
If you are a happy user please consider sharing your story by sending us mail to
stories at sun dot com.

Tuesday Nov 11, 2008

A compilation of today's news of interest - Special Release and Acquisitions Edition:

SpringSource
has announced the acquisition of
G2One
the
Groovy and
Grails specialist company.
Congrats to both!
See the reports from
The Register
and
DZone,
including comments from Rod on their
New Role in the JCP EC.
Maybe SpringSource will be able to finish
JSR 241?
It has been more than 4 years since the EG formed...

Monday Oct 27, 2008

Our Stories
blog tracks informal adoption stories of our middleware Open Source projects.
Most of the initial stories centered on the
GlassFish Server,
but over time we have been expanding from there with a few stories on
OpenMQ and
OpenSSO and
in the last days we added two more.

SSOCircle
is an open identity provider that uses
OpenSSO
to support SAML 2.0 and OpenID and others in federated single sign-on.
SSOCircle went live in Feb 2007;
check their
full story with more
details via the usual
questionnaire.

CDOVaR.Net is a
service provided by
CDO²
to financial institutions to transparently harness grid computing to manage their portfolios.
They needed an LDAP server and chose
OpenDS.
Check the
story
and
questionnaire.

Sunday Oct 26, 2008

Any Best poll is always subjective in one way or another, so here are two more :-)
First
What's the Best AppServer -
with several references to GlassFish.
The second is a question from a prospective GF user that
elicited a
Very Nice Testimonial...
which is a good time for a call for
Adoption Stories;
if you have any, drop us a mail at
stories at sun dot com.

The OpenMQ community page sports a new,
clearner-looking
OpenMQ WebSite.
I hear they also have testimonials and performance numbers cooking;
stay tuned.

The Identity folks at Sun have released a new
Compliance Manager product that elicited good press coverage
(BusinessWire,
SearchSecurity).
This is part of Sun's
Identity Products,
and, like with OpenSSO,
I expect the usability and applicability - not just the functionality -
of all these products to continue to spread
in the future.

NetBeans 6.5 (now in RC) has improvements in
MySQL support,
including knowing about the Sakila sample,
improvements to the SQL Editor,
SQL code completion, displaying multiple rowsets, and SQL history.
Check out Andrei's
NetBeans.TV Screencast,
and thanks to John for the
tip.

Roy (Fielding) has specific objections to the
RESTful API for OpenSocial - see
Roy's note
and
Dave's links
(Roy points the comment to SocialSite, but it really is about OpenSocial).
It seems there is a
discussion thread
on the OpenSocial group discussing how to incorporate that feedback into the spec.

Finally, on the
OpenStorage side,
a couple of good videos discussing the role of Flash in Storage, (both available in two sizes):
Bill Moore
([medium],
[ipod])
and Andy Bechtolsheim
([medium],
[ipod]).
The ipod-sized presentation are ideal for flights :-)

Thursday Oct 16, 2008

Our latest
Adoption Story is about
Advantech.
This israeli company does software and systems integration
in Java, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft environments.
Alexis interviewed Dror Yaffe, the Chief Architect of the Java division,
who explains their use of GlassFish server, OpenMQ,
OpenSSO, OpenESB, MySQL and more.

Saturday Oct 11, 2008

Marco had a small expedition tracking a bug in
GlassFish v2 interacting with
Syslogd.
He found a solution and has
Posted his Story and Patches.
Still working on how the fix will migrate back to the main repository.

OpenSSO now has a set of
RESTful Web Services
to access its functionality to do things like authenticate, authorize, validate, etc.

And, on the same topic, the JCP just
formally announced that
JAX-RS 1.0
is now final.
The final specification is
here.
First JavaEE 6 specification all completed.

Judy reports on a SunTech meeting focused on spreading adoption of GlassFish Server in
China.
Expect us to reach out more to that community in the very near future,
in the meantime, check out
Judy's note.
Added - Judy pointed me to
GlassFish_China Google group.

And SmugMug has a very nice note on how they have been using
OpenSolaris with MySQL and ZFS in production.
Check out
Don MacAskill's note
(don't miss the comments) and
Marc's
initial pointer.

Chinmayee, in Chennai
(called Madras by the british) reports on a
Presentation to Wipro last
month.
Wipro is one of the top
(top 3?) IT companies in India, with over 100K employees.
It's great to see increased adoption in India;
like Brazil and China, these are rapidly growing markets - the
biggest challenge with GlassFish is getting the word out.

Wednesday Oct 01, 2008

OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 got off to a flying start yesterday with its launch in Second Life (event replay). The IdentiCat himself, OpenSSO senior product line manager Daniel Raskin, and director of engineering for OpenSSO, Jamie Nelson, were on hand to explain how OpenSSO meets three tough challenges of single sign-on - Web access management, federation and secure Web services.

As Daniel explained in the Second Life presentation, there's plenty more in store for OpenSSO - the focus in upcoming releases will be on areas such as carrier-grade monitoring, yet more work on ease of use, and entitlement management. As always, we'll carry the OpenSSO headlines here at The Aquarium, but if you want to immerse yourself in the OpenSSO river of news, subscribe to Planet OpenSSO.

We have been sending notifications to
GAP (the
GlassFish Awards Program) for a while
but on MOnday we had a
Press Release
aligned with the first SunTech Days in Sao Paolo to celebrate the winners located in Brazil.
Special congratulations to Claudio and Reginaldo who were at the event.
We are planning a number of blogs to highlight the GAP winners;
we won't be able to cover the 108 of them (!) but we will sample a few.